A draft report of the Russian Public Chamber, "On the Status of Russia's Civil Society", affirms a growth of aggressive xenophobia in the country. "Aggressive xenophobia is a serious challenge to contemporary Russia. Xenophobia reached its peak in 2013, according to a survey of the Levada Center, which said that…

(JTA) — Russian President Vladimir Putin said he will pardon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former Russian oil tycoon who has been jailed for more than 10 years. Putin made the announcement at the end of a four-hour news conference in Moscow, saying Khodorkovsky requested the pardon on humanitarian grounds, since his…

(JTA) — The Russian city of Rostov-on-Don has agreed to acknowledge the Jewish identity of Holocaust victims killed there by the Nazis. The municipality’s Memorial Council last week announced its decision to revise a memorial plaque at the Zmievskaya Balka mass grave to mention the Jewish identity of the majority…

Both sides expressed satisfaction at the scope of trade between Israel and Russia, which in 2013 exceeded $3 billion, with the most significant rise in the area of aviation and tourism. It was agreed that the agreement on establishing a free trade zone between the two countries will be completed in…

By Steven Lee Myers, New York Times MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin exerted new control over Russia’s state news media on Monday, dissolving by decree one of Russia’s official news agencies, RIA Novosti, along with its international radio broadcaster as he continues a drive to strengthen the Kremlin’s…

Their forefathers, who were Christian peasants, embraced Judaism some 200 years ago, and they have stuck to it to this very day. Now, two of 500 members of Subbotnik community from village of Vysoky in southern Russia decide to immigrate to Promised Land. Ariel and Moriah Shishlenikov, residents of the…

http://forward.com/articles/188369/the-only-jewish-kid-in-his-moscow-class/ Once, during a literature lesson in sixth or seventh grade, in around 1981, a note was passed to me from the back of the classroom. It was a sheet of paper ripped from a composition book. “To the Jew from the Russians” (“evreiu ot russkikh”) was scribbled in…

(JTA) — Russian church officials suspended a priest for using an anti-Semitic pejorative while baptizing a girl. The two-month ban on Andrey Evstigneeva was announced earlier this month on the website of the Diocese of Saratov, a city 450 miles southeast of Moscow. It followed complaints by the family and…

YEKATERINBURG, Russia (JTA) — Growing up in one of the Soviet Union’s richest cities, Elena Chudnovskaya never imagined that she would be raising her daughter in a place so full of drug addicts that “the flowerbeds became strewn with syringes.” But that is what became of her downtown apartment block…

(JTA) — Shots were fired at the synagogue of Yekaterinburg, the Russian Jewish Congress said, breaking windows but not injuring anyone. At least two bullets hit the building housing the synagogue on Monday, according to the Russian Jewish Congress team that monitors anti-Semitism. No one was hurt, Matvey Chlenov, deputy…